[PL-sem-jr] Christos on 11/17

[Aaron Turon]

Christos will be giving a talk on his research this Monday, 11/17.
However, since he has *two* recent research projects, he asked me to
send out abstracts to see which topic attracted greater interest.

Please read the abstracts below, and email me your preference.

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The higher-order aggregate problem
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(with Mitch Wand)

We present a multi-pass interprocedural analysis and transformation
for the functional aggregate update problem.  Our solution handles
untyped programs, including unrestricted closures and nested arrays.
Also, it can handle programs that contain a mix of functional and
destructive updates. Correctness of all the analyses and of the
transformation itself is proved.


Future Contracts
-----------------------------

(with Riccardo Pucella and Matthias Felleisen)

Many recent research projects focus on language support for behavioral
software contracts, i.e., assertions that govern the boundaries
between software building blocks (procedures, classes, modules).
Unfortunately, as contracts become complex, they affect the
performance of the program.

In this paper, we introduce *future* contracts and concurrent contract
checking.  That is, software contracts annotated with *future* are
checked  concurrently with the main program, exploiting the now-common
multiple-core architecture. The paper presents both a model and a
prototype implementation of our language design. Our model comprises a
higher-order imperative language and we use it to prove the
correctness of our design. Our implementation is robust enough to
measure  the performance of reasonably large benchmarks, demonstrating
that the use of  *future* contracts can lead to significant
performance  improvements.